Book reviews: The Conscious Cook by Giselle Wilkinson & I.O.U. by John Lanchester

Intelligible yet accurate beginners’ guides to complex subjects are rare:

• If you’re an Australian concerned about the complexities of choosing and cooking food in a world where much of food production is environmentally degrading or downright evil, The Conscious Cook: Sustainable Cooking and Living is the book for you. Author Giselle Wilkinson, a passionate advocate of acting ethically when it comes to eating, spends over half the book discussing aspects of food and the food cycle, covering everything from health and food miles to animal ethics and water impact. Strangely enough, what affected me even more than these thoughtful essays (including plenty of links and sources to enable further reading) were the wonderful recipes in the first hundred pages, all highly attractive (and successful, at least the ones I’ve tried) and selected to illustrate various aspects of ‘best practice’ food choices. An excellent primer. 3½ stars.
• And what about the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis? Here in Australia it seems to have been and gone, but what did it mean? John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay offers a layman’s (Lanchester is a novelist) introduction to the world of finance and why it imploded in 2008. As readers of his novels attest, he is a spirited, readable stylist, and in his hands the complex arcane universe of banks, shares, bonds, mortgages and derivatives springs into life. As a veteran of the finance world, he gets the facts right, although his scathing attitude towards my peers is a little overdone (only a little – who can dispute the horrible truths?). A final reflective chapter called ‘The Bill’ (as in the GFC’s costs) concludes ‘that we’ve just lived through an economic golden age . . . one based on debt and on an unsustainable credit bubble, and underpinned by a financial system which was, it turned out, taking crazily miscalculated risks . . .’ An invaluable introduction. 3½ stars.